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Saturday, 6 June 2015

Overcoming Amalek

“Remember what Amalek did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt,how he met you along the way and attacked among you all the stragglers at your rear when you were faint and weary; and he did not fear God.…” Deuteronomy 25:17-18

When Am Yisrael came out of Egypt, it was the weak that Amalek targeted and killed physically. Although the goal of some of Am Yisrael’s enemies, disguised as friends, is not to attack, their method has remained the same. Today, when Am Yisrael is in his Home in Eretz Yisrael, it is again the weak that they target, this time in an effort to induce a spiritual demise upon us.

I am referring to missionaries, the Eleventh Plague, who spend millions of dollars and every precious minute of their time trying to convert Jews, disguising their efforts as love for the People of G-d, in order to save us. As in the past, these new Amalekites target the weak, the stragglers, the ill-prepared, the faint and the weary.

Unlike the ancient Amalekites who were militarily sneaky, albeit very outright and direct about their agenda, today’s robbers of Jewish souls and the Jewish spirit of the recipients of the Torah use every devious method to achieve their goal. They very carefully choose their victims. They target the needy, the poor, kids from broken families, lone IDF soldiers with no support network in the country or new olim who are looking for friends. In the words of S. Jonah Pressman, a long time follower of missionaries who is well familiar with their Modus Operandi “Wherever you find a ‘needy’ individual, you will find a missionary vulture ready to swoop down and pick at the flesh until the soul becomes his.”

Once they have identified their prey, the missionaries then set themselves to luring their victims. They do it by offering them money, food, inviting them for “Shabbat Dinners”, handing out candy bars and showering them with attention and promises for a better life. That is how Shay Gorohovsky fell into their trap.

At the tender and troubled age of sixteen, desperate Shay was an easy target for missionaries; she fit the profile of a prospective prey. Coming from a broken home, Shay met people who made her “feel very loved and accepted.” One day, they invited her to join a group to “discuss life.” She agreed. “Within an hour,” she tells me, “I had someone place a bible in my hands” and within a few days after that, “I was told that I needed to be baptized to cleanse my sins, to be forgiven and to have my demons removed.” Shay believed they were her friends because she was desperately in need of some. She confided in them, trusted them and shared personal information with them. They offered to help her “heal her pain by giving herself to Christ.”

She firmly declined when she realize that she was surrounded by people who wanted to change her as if there were something wrong with her. Their implacable efforts to drown her in guilt pushed her to re-examine her Jewish soul. She “suddenly realized that one could never baptize a strong Jewish soul,” she declares triumphantly. “With a strong Jewish soul, we will always return to our truth, to our blood. Once a Jewish soul, we will always return to our rightful place, physically and spiritually.”

This is Shay’s message to her fellow Jews, a message that needs to be broadcasted to Jewish educators, a message that we need to strongly pass on to Am Yisrael wherever they are. Help keep the faith, educate young Jewish boys and girls to know their heritage, to be proud of it and be ready to defend it. At the same time, they need to be made aware of and warned against the antics and devious methods used by missionaries to lure them away from it.

Unlike the members of Am Yisrael that came out of Egypt and were too unprepared, too unorganized to defend themselves against the Amalek of then, the Am Yisrael of today is in a much better position. We can fight and overcome any efforts by the Amaleks of today whose goal may not be to destroy us only physically but, as we witness more and more, also spiritually!